It is 10.39 pm and I have just come home, after spending whole day (whole 2 weeks, actually) preparing for the super-important (or, is it?) QE. I used to enjoy studying and I think I am still enjoying it. I still love to read all those textbooks, re-read those old structural analysis things, smile to myself whenever I understand any concepts better, and I still think mechanics and dynamics very beautiful; however, I begin to question whether it is enough. I mean, whether a liking (I think I should not boast by saying “love” or “passion” instead of liking) to a major is enough to climb the ivory tower I’m climbing now. Talent isn’t genious, Louisa May Alcott said through the voice of beautiful Amy March. I finished reading Alcott’s Little Women a week ago, and one of its heroine, Amy, was really talented for arts. However, when she traveled to Rome and stood face to face to the marvelous work of arts there, she realized that “talent isn’t genious”, and that she has to give up her dream of being a great artist, which she had cherished since her childhood merely because she is talented.

I hope that is not my case. I don’t think my dream is too high compared to my ability (or so I thought, up to now). I have never, as long as I remember, dreamt to stood in Stockholm podium. But I do have a dream of being a professor. I do have a dream that someday, in my 70th anniversary, my colleagues and students will gather to celebrate “a very fruitful life” as the civil engineering world did at Shinozuka’s. Is it too high a dream? But a dream has to be high, otherwise how can you call it a dream? Yet what I heard this afternoon makes me trembling. Will I survive? (I don’t even say, succeed – but may be in grad school the 2 terms are equal). What would my future be, I wonder?